I like some points of the article, but stating we are not naturally anything, and then in the next paragraph claiming: '"your base instincts" deserve more credit.', is very illogical.
There's a huge gap between any "natural" instincts (needing to eat, needing to sleep, breathe, keep warm, social connections) and the sort of tasks you need to do in your modern life, like writing a boring report. The idea of laziness - and that there's virtue in doing such things - is a cultural trueism, not a "natural" state of humans.
> Why are we so hard on ourselves? I think it’s because we have a bad theory about how our minds work, one so dastardly that it could have only been devised by the devil himself. It goes like this:
>> We humans are, deep down, lazy and gluttonous creatures. If left to our own devices, we will do nothing but eat Pringles and watch Netflix. The only way we can escape our indolent nature is to exert our higher faculties over our base instincts.
1) Humans are naturally lazy
2) Human instinct drives us to do things that are bad for us
Stating we are "naturally something" implies that there is an fixed equilibrium point that our behavior naturally converges to.
The second claim about basic instincts is talking about the dynamic processes going on in your body that you are not consciously aware of. It's not saying anything about how those processes work. They can be perfectly valid, important processes that only act in response to contextual information (that is, it is entirely possible for them to not have a "natural, default" behavior).
I understand that reading natural as a "fixed equilibrim" might mean that to you, but for me, and also others it doesn't mean that. So would be good to better explain that in the article.
I have to admit that my interpretation is biased by reading some post-phenomenological philosophy as part of my design master - I remember one paper that claimed that there is no "natural" endpoint because humans are always reacting to a dynamic context, one that is then changing in response to human interaction, meaning we're more like a chaotic pendulum swinging back and forth over ever-changing equilibrium points.
And yeah, I do agree that the article is a bit ambiguous here and could be clearer.